International Library of Essays in Law and Legal Theory (Second Series) – serie

Rights brings together the most influential essays of the last thirty years critiquing and defending the liberal rights tradition. Modern 'rights critics' have focused on the perceived conflict between liberal rights and progressive or egalitarian political objectives, the preference of liberal states for negative over positive rights and also the dangers to community of the overly atomistic conception of human nature, which is arguably at the heart of the liberal rights tradition.

Privacy is a complex and controversial right. The essays in this book address fundamental issues about its value and how best it may be defined. Some of them examine its importance and scope in the context of the information society in which both government and business acquire ever more knowledge about the conduct and attitudes of individuals. Others address the use of privacy to protect the rights of women and to protect individuals against the media.

This volume provides an introduction to the major themes and theoretical perspectives of contemporary work in Law and Anthropology. It reflects both important recent ethnography of law and the state, and the dialogue of jurists and anthropologists concerning legal institutions in the present era of economic globalization and renewed civil and international conflict.

The leading articles on gender and justice within Anglo-American legal theory are assembled in this volume. The essays are drawn primarily from the writings of lawyers working in the common law tradition and they mainly examine the justice of legal institutions. Due to the close kinship between political and legal theories of justice, the book also includes a selection of the work of the more prominent political theorists of justice and gender.

Law and economics is an influential field of legal theory in the United States. Its practitioners use the methodology of economics for the purpose of analyzing a diverse assortment of legal topics. This volume contains a selection of recent work in law and economics. The first part includes representative articles from different fields of law, including contracts, torts, criminal law, intellectual property and civil procedure. The second part shows ways in which law and economics has been changing in the last decade. It includes articles representing recent work that relaxes the rational actor model by introducing biases discovered by cognitive psychology; that tests law and economics with experimental techniques that are now popular in economics; that introduces computer modeling to law and economics; and that expands the domain of law and economics to take account of social norms and political structures. The articles are accessible to students and scholars with no prior expertise in economics and minimal familiarity with American law.

What does it mean to adopt a sociological perspective on law? Treating law as an aspect of social life, part of a larger social environment, the aim is to understand the environment and law’s place within it systematically and empirically. The papers in these two volumes reflect the variety of these sociological perspectives and have been carefully selected from the wide range of literature currently available.

Legal scholarship is concerned with distinctive issues and problems of regulatory governance. This volume draws together writings on regulation which problematize law in regulatory settings and which introduce problems of regulatory law to legal theory. The main themes addressed are: the character of regulatory law; legal theories of state and market; regulatory rules; organizations and institutional variety; accounting for regulation.

The study of law is a branch of the study of politics. Even those who emphasize the autonomy of law, either sociologically or normatively, must acknowledge that this is a position that requires justification within a broader theory of politics that either explains or justifies this autonomy. Inevitably, therefore, developments in political life and in political philosophy have a significant effect on the practice of law and its theoretical study. Currently this relationship is evident in the impact of recent developments in the practice and theory of democracy that are redolent with implications for law and legal theory. This collection represents the body of captivating literature that is engaged not only with current developments in law and politics but also with the rediscovery of traditional theories. It offers a way into an engaging and important debate that bears of the most fundamental issues within both legal and political theory.

The rule of law is frequently invoked in political debate, yet rarely defined with any precision. Some employ it as a synonym for democracy, others for the subordination of the legislature to a written constitution and its judicial guardians. It has been seen as obedience to the duly-recognised government, a form of governing through formal and general rule-like laws and the rule of principle. Given this diversity of view, it is perhaps unsurprising that certain scholars have regarded the concept as no more than a self-congratulatory rhetorical device. This collection of eighteen key essays from jurists, political theorists and public law political scientists, aims to explore the role law plays in the political system. The introduction evaluates their arguments. The first eleven essays identify the standard features associated with the rule of law. These are held to derive less from any characteristics of law per se than from a style of legislating and judging that gives equal consideration to all citizens. The next seven essays then explore how different ways of separating and dispersing power contribute to this democratic style of rule by forcing politicians and judges alike to treat people as equals and regard none as above the law.

Constitutionalism and democracy have been interpreted as both intimately related and intrinsically opposed. On the one hand constitutions are said to set out the rules of the democratic game, on the other as constraining the power of the demos and their representatives to rule themselves - including by reforming the very processes of democracy itself. Meanwhile, constitutionalists themselves differ on how far any constitution derives its authority from, and should itself be subject to democratic endorsement and interpretation. They also dispute whether constitutions should refer solely to democratic processes, or also define and limit democratic goals. Each of these positions produces a different view of judicial review, the content and advisability of a Bill of Rights and the nature of constitutional politics. These differences are not simply academic positions, but are reflected in the different types of constitutional democracy found in the United States, continental Europe, Britain and many commonwealth countries. The selected essays explore these issues from the perspectives of law, philosophy and political science. A detailed and informative introduction sets them in the context of contemporary debates about constitutionalism.

Over the last 300 years public international law has developed from a set of principles, ultimately grounded in natural law, into an extremely complex web of norms, supporting and sustained by an array of international institutions which, in combination, present a system for the realisation of global public order. These volumes, arranged into five parts, bring together key writings which both illustrate and exemplify ideas that have informed the historical development of the discipline. The first part outlines three approaches, based on systems of natural laws, positivist systems and finally the system of 'public' international order. Parts two to four reflect aspects of the issues raised in this introduction in the context of a number of key areas of substantive law, these being sources, personality and jurisdiction and immunity. The final part then takes a look into the potential futures of international law and the international legal system from a variety of perspectives, including global administrative law, transgovernmentalism and public law conceptions of international order.

What does it mean to adopt a sociological perspective on law? Treating law as an aspect of social life, part of a larger social environment, the aim is to understand the environment and law’s place within it systematically and empirically. The papers in these two volumes reflect the variety of these sociological perspectives and have been carefully selected from the wide range of literature currently available.

Despite persistent criticism from a variety of different perspectives including natural law, legal realism and socio-legal studies, legal positivism remains as an enduring theory of law. The essays contained in this volume represent the most balanced responses toward legal positivism and although largely sympathetic, the essays do not fail to criticize elements of the tradition wherever appropriate.

China's Confucian-based imperial legal system developed and flourished for more than 3000 years. Its disintegration, following the collapse of the last dynasty in 1911, ushered in a new century of legal experimentation, development and intermittent disorder. No single book could possibly offer a completely comprehensive discussion of every element of the rich and diverse system of Chinese law. However, the articles included in this volume illustrate the very best of English language academic scholarship in this area. They represent a collective introduction to the law and legal theory of China and provide a perceptive and well informed guide to a huge subject area of enormous depth and complexity.

The essays in this volume reflect several important and widely-discussed issues in legal theory. One set of issues may be characterized as legal hermeneutics, a consideration of the practices governing the retrieval and determination of meaning from legal texts and in legal contexts. Related issues arise from the use of literature and literary criticism to enhance an understanding of law and from the study of legal rhetoric.